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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28924785">A Red Noise of Bones</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldcobalt/pseuds/coldcobalt'>coldcobalt</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Watchmen - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blow Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming In Pants, Dissociation, Dubious Consent, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Roche Case, The Inherent Horror of Living Spaces, failing to communicate: the pairing: the fic: the experience</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 09:22:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>12,132</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28924785</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/coldcobalt/pseuds/coldcobalt</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Roche case unfolds. Dan and Walter may not want the same things, after all.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dan Dreiberg/Rorschach</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>59</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Please heed the tags, this isn't a fix-it.</p><p>A huge thanks to my beta reader, <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mothfinder_General/pseuds/Mothfinder_General">Mothfinder_General</a>, for their extremely careful and thorough editing advice, and to <a href="https://fandom-poetry.dreamwidth.org/">the Fandom Poetry project</a> for introducing me to Neruda.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Rorschach stands in the brownstone's kitchen, drinking a post-patrol coffee out of an ancient Guggenheim mug. Dan can feel the weight of his stare from halfway across the room.</p><p>Dan’s not incapable by nature; he knows how to calculate the Coandă effect, can wrangle complex physics in his sleep. </p><p>He doesn’t know what to do with this.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>New York is a collection of liminal spaces. Beneath the thronging crowds, below miles of steel and concrete, there are pockets where the true spirit of the city bleeds through. It's in the rusted labyrinth of abandoned subway tunnels, in the hushed spots under steel bridge girders. It's in places where anything can happen.</p><p>That’s where the two of them work best.</p><p>Patrol tonight’s another one of these in-between spots; the boundary between Greenpoint’s edge and the waterline; a ramshackle collection of old buildings with windows like broken teeth. They’ve walked and walked until squat single-family homes gave way to silent factories and they can hear the waves crashing against the western lip of Brooklyn.</p><p>The decrepit building they stop at looks long-abandoned, a poster tacked on the rolled-down steel grate announces it’s slated for demolition early next year. The doorway gives up the ghost after a shove and a half; the entrance to the kaleidoscoping staircase is barely any better. There’s nothing special about it. Nite Owl doesn’t care.</p><p>“Up for a little stargazing?”</p><p>“You’re joking,” Rorschach says. </p><p>Normally, Nite Owl tolerates the all-business attitude; welcomes it, even. But tonight’s been dead, deader than dead, and there’s something buzzing quietly just under his skin.</p><p>“Why would I be?”</p><p>Rorschach scoffs, the arc of his shoulders betraying his displeasure. He follows.</p><p>***</p><p>When the exit door opens and they step out onto the third-floor roof, it’s like breaking above the grimy waterline; like breathing fresh air for the first time.</p><p>The city unfurls below them, and it’s one thing to catch a glimpse through Archie’s eyes at ten thousand feet; it’s another feeling entirely to be another tiny part of the grid.</p><p>It’s a view of New York that Nite Owl will never get tired of. Sometimes, when he’s just Dan—meek and uninteresting and himself—he’ll catch himself looking up at the glittering infinity of midtown’s spires, the endless rows of terra cotta and chrome.</p><p> <em>I live here</em>, he’ll think, and the pride that burns in his chest is like a rising sun.</p><p>On the rot-pitted rooftop, it’s a crisp autumn night. The wind kicks up, chasing clouds across the wide expanse of sky; Newtown Creek filters into the East River with a dull roar. Rorschach braces a foot on the rooftop’s lip, hands in his pockets, and looks out over the water.</p><p>The tails of his trench whip around him; he’s silhouetted by Manhattan’s mythical skyline. There’s no trace of neuroticism here, no sign of his coarse-grain sandpaper personality or incredible, unbelievable stubbornness. Just a hyper-competent detective watching over a shining city.</p><p>Something blooms beneath Nite Owl’s sternum. <em><b>We</b></em> <em>live here.</em></p><p>His hand settles on Rorschach’s canvas shoulder. Just this once, Rorschach lets it.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Now, hours later in the brownstone’s kitchen, Dan can feel Rorschach staring at him. Dan gives up on the coffee, lets the too-hot mug warm the tips of his fingers. He clears his throat. </p><p>“Penny for your thoughts?”</p><p>A long pause, the hollow thunk of porcelain on formica. </p><p>“My thoughts.” Rorschach echoes, suddenly eight feet closer, near enough to touch, and an ache races down Dan’s spine like lightning.</p><p>When Rorschach grabs Dan’s shoulders, slamming them against the back of his chair, it’s only a little bit of a surprise. This is something that’s begun happening: on patrols; in pin-drop quiet subway stations; in Archie’s cavernous belly, Rorschach shuddering in Nite Owl’s grip. It’s always half lit and fleeting, a minor logistical nightmare; afterwards, they fit themselves back into their half-discarded costumes, finish the patrol. They don’t talk about it.</p><p>But this development is new. They’ve never done anything in the brownstone before, no matter how much Dan’s thought about it in—mostly—non-masturbatory contexts. He’s tired of grappling with his own open-ended questions.</p><p>Dan doesn’t know what he wants. He wants Rorschach to grind him into the <em>fridge.</em></p><p>He can sense the heat thrown off by his partner’s body, feels Rorschach hard against his thigh. Dan’s hard too—dizzy with it, just stupid—and and maybe that’s the reason he finally takes the leap. </p><p>“Do you,” Dan blurts, voice too loud in the kitchen’s humming silence, “want to come upstairs?” </p><p>Dan expects a rejection. Possibly also a verbal tantrum. But instead, Rorschach inclines his head in a near imperceptible-nod; he backs up one step, two and stands waiting.</p><p>Dan takes the flight of stairs two at a time.</p><p>***</p><p>The upstairs hallway is just the wrong side of precarious with all the lights off; Dan leaves them that way. Behind him, Rorschach’s barely more than a silhouette: the flash of pinstripes, an off-white shirtcuff. He’s as quiet as he ever is.</p><p>Light from the streetlamp filters in from the landing, dividing the space into dreamlike shapes; the bedroom’s the same. Everything looks unreal and Dan gets the momentary, terrible feeling that this is just all some embarrassing dream.</p><p>Except it isn’t; Rorschach, the real flesh-and-blood version of him, sits on the bed next to Dan.  He peels his mask off in one quick motion and though Dan’s seen his face before, both piecemeal and all at once—on the street during patch-ups and frantic, bloody scrambles through the city sewers—he’s never seen it anywhere <em>safe. </em>It’s a gesture, like holding Nite Owl steady as he shudders from blood loss, like extending a helping hand after a fall. It’s a sign of trust.</p><p>Walter’s hands clench on Dan’s collar. He lets Dan kiss him.</p><p>***</p><p>Unsurprisingly, Walter’s just as tightly wound in civilian spaces as Rorschach is streetside. There’s a nervous tension in the way he moves; it’s bigger than Walter, bigger than the both of them, crackling through the night air like static. It fills the too-big bedroom like a living thing.</p><p>Dan sucks a clumsy circle below Walter’s ear, another on the edge of his collarbone. He watches the pale line of Walter’s neck as he bares it and feels an abstract, indescribable longing nearly strike him down on the spot.</p><p> Walter’s teeth click together, swallowing the quiet sounds he’s making and with a rush, Dan’s hit with all the possibilities—pushing Walter back against the bed; Rorschach looming over him, pushing inside inch by inch—and he has to make a frantic grab at himself before something embarrassing happens.</p><p>“Penny for your thoughts,” Walter says, hoarsely, and Dan can’t help but laugh.</p><p>***</p><p>Without Dan’s glasses, Walter’s face is a soft blur above him. All Dan can see is a splash of orange, desaturated against the darkness. A bare swath of flushed skin. </p><p>It’s just like the alleyways; it’s nothing like them at all. Dan’s always been good at keeping his two selves separate, but in the halflight, the facade flickers: Walter, Rorschach, Walter-as-Rorschach. The bedroom’s just another liminal space, and Dan’s not sure if the distinction really matters here.</p><p> He kneels at the feet of the only man he’s ever trusted with his life, runs his clammy hands down the pinstripes. Moonlight filters through the blinds.</p><p>***</p><p>Dan presses a single kiss on the inside of Walter’s thigh, then wraps his mouth around his cock.</p><p>Walter makes a loud, surprised noise, clamping his legs tight around Dan’s head, and the sudden roar of blood in Dan’s ears deafens him to everything else, because he’s always wanted to do this. It’s not just about sex; it’s about finally having someone who knows Dan for who he really is, man and mask both. It’s about both of them finally wanting the same things.</p><p>Dan grinds clumsily down against the heel of his free hand, because if he stops for even a second to shuck off his boxers, the moment will slip away like a fleeting memory. The muscles of Walter’s thighs are already cable-tight and trembling. His hands scrabble against the back of Dan’s head.</p><p>Dan’s jaw starts to ache and his knees go numb and he doesn’t care; Walter rocks up into his mouth again and again, quiet, so quiet, and Dan wants nothing more than this. </p><p>It doesn’t take long. Walter spills into Dan’s mouth with a choked sound, and that’s what tips Dan over the edge; he bucks hard against the heel of his hand and comes, cupping himself through his underwear, kneeling on the cold floorboards. He squeezes his eyes shut, face pressed into the muscled plane of Walter’s thigh, and breathes.</p><p>***</p><p>Afterwards, Dan lets himself gloat a little. </p><p>Walter lies sleeping next to him; curled up, utterly conked out. He seems so much smaller when he’s not in motion, an avatar of inertia suddenly, temporarily stilled.</p><p>Under the covers, Dan slides up behind Walter, throws an arm over his scrawny side. He knows there’s still a gulf between them, some things he doesn’t quite get. But it doesn’t matter, really. Because they’re a team. They can still be a team after this.</p><p><em>It’s going to be okay,</em> Dan tells himself, face buried in Walter's hair, and as he tips into the abyss of sleep, he doesn’t dream at all.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Two days later, a bus driver’s daughter goes missing.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Please note warnings in the updated tags, we're entering "canon-compliant misery" territory.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Roche home is thick with the smell of rot. Dishes covered in tinfoil line the kitchen counters, spilling over onto the living room table: casseroles and cold sandwiches, other unidentifiable vehicles of communal grief beginning to molder. All are untouched.</p><p>Blaire Roche has been missing for less than seventy-two hours, but her absence is palpable here: an emptiness, a blank child-sized space. In the small apartment, it’s inescapable. Well-worn children’s toys in plastic containers line the back wall; a half-sized pink chair dotted with butterflies sits next to the kitchen table. </p><p>A secondhand dollhouse sits in the corner of the beige living room, half hidden by a patterned sheet. Rorschach declines to look at it.</p><p>“—The police say they’re working on it, but we just—” Blaire’s father wrings his hands, slides them up his tear-streaked face. “She’s only six. She’s our <em>baby.”  </em></p><p>Blaire’s mother sits next to him on the threadbare couch, silent as a stone. Her makeup runs down her cheeks.</p><p>Rorschach has little faith in the NYPD as a rule, but he is especially pessimistic about cases involving children. He has seen how they handle these investigations, more like lost property than anything else; they expend the same effort as a stolen purse or items pinched in a streetside mugging. This is why he and Nite Owl are here, at Rorschach’s recommendation. They are offering their assistance.</p><p>“We’ll keep you updated with any developments,” Nite Owl is saying, too passive by far, and it is this—and the Roches curled around each other with grief, like hollow buildings waiting for a wrecking ball, and the derelict dollhouse with its mourning shroud, and a thousand other things besides—that drives Rorschach to speak.</p><p>“We’ll get her back.”</p><p>He catches Nite Owl’s horrified expression out of the corner of his eye; he chooses to ignore it. Blaire’s mother stands, openly sobbing now; before Rorschach can act, she is embracing him, wet cheek touching his though the mask. Out of courtesy and respect, he permits it.</p><p>***</p><p>“Kinda wish you hadn’t said that,” Daniel says, later, in the belly of the Archimedes. His mask remains in place, as does his costume; he is, by all metrics, still Nite Owl. But Rorschach recognizes this lack of confidence, this futile, faithless wavering, understands it could only ever be Daniel behind it.</p><p>“We don’t want to get their hopes up,” Daniel continues, “I mean—there’s no guarantees with these kinds of cases, man.”</p><p>A useless sentiment; Daniel’s self-doubt is not Rorschach's burden to bear. If his partner is grappling with his personal capabilities, then Rorschach will allow him to do so on his own time. But not here and now, not on patrol. Not with the current stakes.</p><p>Rorschach sits with his back straight in the copilot’s chair, watches the pinpoint reflection of stars pass across the airship’s windshield. </p><p>No matter the odds, Rorschach resolves, he and Nite Owl will bring Blaire Roche back home.</p><p>***</p><p>Morning comes far too soon. The sun blazes through Walter’s dirty blinds, glaring furiously off the case notes scattered across the table. Walter stares blearily at them. It is nearly 8 AM; he is supposed to be at his workstation in thirty minutes.</p><p>(<em>She’s only six, </em>Blaire Roche’s father says. <em>Only six.</em>)</p><p>His day job can wait, Walter decides. His true obligations cannot. Somewhere above him, two people begin to shout; a heavy piece of furniture screams across their floor.</p><p>He grits his teeth and returns to the task at hand.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Dan’s phone rings bright and early the next morning, startling him awake. For a second, he’s half convinced he’s still dreaming, because—aside from Hollis, who knows better than to try Dan before mid-afternoon—no one really <em>calls</em> him. He picks up the receiver, confused.</p><p>“Morning,” Laurie says, “don’t tell me you’re still sleeping.”</p><p>He stifles a yawn. “Not me.”</p><p>Her laugh sounds just like he remembers.</p><p>Breezily, Laurie gives him the rundown. She’s in town for some U.N. conference—well<em>Jon’s </em>in town for some U.N. conference—and she’d rather revisit her old stomping grounds than be left behind in muggy D.C. She’s been allowed to run wild for the afternoon, and does Dan want to grab lunch?</p><p>Dan does.</p><p>They meet on the Upper East Side, in a quiet, upscale, restaurant next to Central Park. The place is about two degrees more formal than Dan expected. The weather’s unseasonably hot, too warm for late October, and he’s sweating in his suit jacket.</p><p>A weird sense of déjà vucrashes over Dan when Laurie arrives. All Dan’s memories of her are of a foul mouthed-teenager; a person he crossed paths with at the Crimebusters meeting and on the occasional patrol. Sure, she’d been kind of a terror, a fiercely effective fighter with skills gleaned from two separate generations. Criminals would make fun of her to her face, only to be left lying on the pavement, holding their own teeth.</p><p>It had been kind of funny at the time, a baby-faced kid playacting at violence. In retrospect, maybe there wasn’t that much humor in it, after all.</p><p>Laurie settles into her chair across from him, and she’s not a kid anymore. She’s dressed smartly, in a way that whispers <em>government contractor</em>, but it’s all practical, no nonsense. She could probably fight half the waitstaff, if she had to. </p><p>She’s still the same person, unquestionably, still a mask beneath it all. But now, unlike Dan, she stays intimidating even out of costume. When she smiles, her eyes cut.</p><p>“So,” Laurie says, flipping a curtain of hair over her shoulder. “It’s been a while. Keeping the city under control?”</p><p>***</p><p>From an outsider’s viewpoint, they could be anyone, just two old friends catching up over lunch. They swap small talk: about Laurie’s mom (<em>still a busybody</em>, Laurie says, <em>same as always), </em>D.C. happenings. Laurie carries most of the conversational weight.</p><p> She dodges all of Dan’s questions about government functions, but the facade slips a little when Dan asks about Jon’s U.N. meeting.</p><p>“Nuclear protocol, probably,” she says, “it’s usually nukes. They’re worried about World War III.” </p><p>She shrugs, changes topics before Dan can press further. He lets the subject wither.</p><p>Eventually, they start swapping patrol stories. Laurie gets a few good ones in, and then Dan does too, and it’s like the looming, uncertain future is just a bad dream, waved away by the dawn. By the time dessert comes, Dan’s finally forgotten his nerves; he brings out his favorite anecdote: a recent success, one that ended with him and Rorschach hauling a small-stakes pickpocket out of the Gowanus. He laughs every time he remembers it.</p><p>“And you know what that canal’s full of, the smell was awful. It took <em>days </em>to get Archie’s interior back to normal. Poor guy must have misjudged the distance—”</p><p>“You seem happy.” she says, suddenly. Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes.</p><p>And Dan suddenly feels like the world’s biggest asshole for laughing about solo patrols, because Laurie can’t do them anymore. Too much of a national security risk. He feels the bitterness emanating off her in waves.</p><p>A waste of her talent; a waste of her <em>life. </em>Dan can’t imagine that kind of sacrifice.</p><p>Outside the window, it’s a perfect fall day. The sunlight filters through the leaves in the park, casts fractal shadows on the ground. Dan knows he has a hell of a case waiting for him at home, and a long slog of an investigation to conduct, but outside, the sky is a brilliant, cloudless blue.</p><p>(He thinks of a trenchcoat against a city skyline; of red hair, beacon-bright in the bedroom dark.)</p><p>“You know what?” Dan says, grinning, “I am.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“Barely worth the paper this is printed on,” Rorschach says, rifling through Blaire Roche’s case file. Dan has to agree.</p><p>The NYPD’s case file is only a few sheets thick, and most of that’s scrap written by some junior officer. They’re not technically even supposed to have this worse-than-useless resource, but Nite Owl knows just a little too much about the configuration of the investigating precinct’s record room, and Rorschach’s far too capable to be stopped by a simple cylinder lock.</p><p>Dan almost wishes the file were empty, because this isn’t exactly his first missing child case. Back in 1966, Jeffrey Iddings had caused a media frenzy, complete with billboard ads, multiple evening news spots. Nite Owl and Rorschach had been personally given access to those case files, and they had been reams thick. They’d had <em>maps. </em></p><p>But Jeffrey had been, well, <em>cute</em>—the only available photo of Blair Roche shows a frail-looking kid  with a mousy underbite—and much more financially comfortable. There had been rumors of political bribes by the Iddings, some family favors called in. From the Roche’s apartment, it’s clear that they don’t have those connections, let alone that kind of disposable income.</p><p>It seems a little too obvious what kind of kids the city sees worth searching for. Dan tries not to think about that.</p><p>***</p><p>The break in the case comes from an offhand remark. Dan and Rorschach have already sifted through the rest of the folder’s contents: interviews with Blaire’s parents (no red flags), two of her teachers (also completely unremarkable). But there’s also an interview with her downstairs neighbor.</p><p>It’s handwritten, not even typed, and fairly short even for the NYPD. The neighbor, a persnickety older man, makes his irritation clear from the outset, repeatedly says he never actually saw any abduction. But his apartment is front-facing, with a clear view of the street.</p><p>“—Bright red car loitering around, louder than shit. Had these big, ugly wing things on the back, like two shark fins. Real gaudy. </p><p>Been living here forty years, I can tell you: no one in this neighborhood owns a car like that—”</p><p>Something clicks in the back of Dan’s mind.</p><p>“Hey, I think I’ve got something.”</p><p>Rorschach reads the transcript over Dan’s shoulder. “Looks like a simple neighborly dispute, not a clue. Experienced them myself, probing old men with nothing better to do, cataloguing other people’s comings and goings—”</p><p>“No,” Dan says, and would it kill Rorschach to compliment him, for once? “This is important, when’s the last time you heard a car engine? That thing’s a pre-Manhattan model, probably; practically a relic. I’d bet it runs on <em>gas.</em>”</p><p>That gets Rorschach’s attention, because even he knows gasoline is a thing of the past. The switch had been almost immediate: in the late fifties and early sixties, there had been gas stations on every corner; by ‘63, they were gone and the new electric vehicles were gliding down every highway, graceful as feathers. Dan’s not even sure where someone would <em>find</em> gasoline anymore.</p><p>Dan’s never really been a car guy—not one like Hollis, anyway, who can probably identify transmission models in his sleep—but he’s still picked up a few things over the years.</p><p>“The wings are the giveaway; probably Chevrolet Bel Aire from the late fifties. That shape’s pretty distinct, my next-door neighbor as a kid had one.” The more Dan thinks about it, the more sure he is. If he closes his eyes, he can still see it: bright red steel on blacktop, baking hot in the suburban summer.</p><p>Things move a little more quickly after that. </p><p>Soon, they discover that the Department of Motor Vehicles has even worse security than the NYPD. Over the last several years, the city has begun digitizing its records into a consolidated database. It protects data against physical theft—and Rorschach’s lockpicking finesse—but it doesn’t exactly make for an iron fortress of information security.</p><p>Dan keys in a few more lines of COBOL and the data unspools on the screen in front of him, cursor blinking against the black. A quick look at the results proves Dan’s hunch right: there are only a handful of gas-powered Chevys in the state, only three late-fifties Bel Aires with a red colorway. Two are marked as scrapped.</p><p>Dan taps the screen. “Here’s our best shot, the one listed under Lucas Filipovik. The registration’s a little expired, though.”</p><p> “Registration’s not the only thing that’s expired.” Rorschach says from behind Dan, just a hair too close. “Filipovik got stabbed in Gravesend in ‘73 in broad daylight; left a bloody smear halfway up Stillwell. Made the papers.”</p><p>“Oh,” Dan says. “Right.”</p><p>“Still usable. Would have been more useful yesterday or the day before, but no matter. Recognize you have other commitments.”</p><p>A kernel of anger flares beneath Dan's ribcage, a campfire ember kicked up by a sudden breeze. It’s kind of a surprise how much it smarts, because where does Rorschach get off on that accusation, anyway?</p><p>Dan’s the one who gleaned something useful from the throwaway case file; Dan’s the one who put two and two together. Rorschach, to the best of Dan’s knowledge, can’t even <em>drive.</em></p><p>He takes a breath, lets it pass.</p><p>“Probably stolen, then.” Dan keys in a few more commands; the screen transmutes itself into a plain white display, like nothing was ever there. “Let’s see where the trail leads.” </p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>“C’mere,” Daniel whispers, hand too warm where it hovers on Walter’s hip. Once again, they’re in Daniel’s bedroom: a recursive loop, an inevitability. </p><p>There’s trepidation sitting low in Walter’s chest; it’s irrelevant, because this scenario is necessary. Nothing so literal as his mother’s clients, no money changing hands, but Walter understands, nonetheless, that this arrangement is transactional. An unspoken give-and-take.</p><p>Above him, Daniel looms: panting, red-faced. Daniel, who has stitched up Walter’s wounds and tolerated Walter’s inadequacies and stood by Rorschach, streetside, for nearly a decade.  His wide shoulders block the last gasps of daylight from the bedroom window, and there is something about this scenario that Walter does not like.</p><p>He fights back the urge to pull down his mask, because he is no longer wearing it; his uniform lies on the bedroom carpet like a shed skin. He cannot claim to be anyone other than himself.</p><p>He spreads his legs wider.</p><p>Daniel moans into the side of Walter’s neck. He ruts clumsily against Walter’s stomach; his bulk pushes Walter further into the mattress. He, too has removed his outfit, is clothed only in shadow.</p><p>Walter does not look at the span of Daniel’s shoulders, the minute swell of his stomach. He does not acknowledge the coarse hair between Daniel’s thighs. </p><p>“Do you want to—I mean, is it okay if I—?” Daniel says, and it is nauseating enough that Walter is allowing this newest transgression; worse still that he is being forced to listen to Daniel’s babbling about it. He grips Walter's hips, pulling Walter flush against him, and Walter can feel Daniel's penis twitch against his abdomen.</p><p>Walter allows himself to roll onto his stomach. His body is gripped with the disgusting urge to seek friction, to grind his hips against the bed, anything, until the ache is gone. He lets the impulse dissolve, like waves breaking on a distant shore.</p><p>He gets the distinct sense that none of this is happening. “Stop talking.”</p><p>He presses his clammy face to the pillow, forces himself not to look as Daniel clicks open a bottle of lubricant behind him. Slick fingers slide up the inside of Walter’s thighs, cool and firm. There is a sudden humming in his ears, a subtle sense of disconnect. He realizes with, sudden, total certainty, that he does not want this.</p><p>(Daniel would stop, if he asked. Walter does not ask.)</p><p>The fingers breach him.</p><p>It doesn’t feel anything close to pleasureable, but Walter’s body reacts nonetheless. His hips jerk back against the intrusion—once, twice—and he ejaculates on the pristine bedsheet.</p><p>The hum crescendos; it becomes a white field of static, an electrical storm that drowns out everything else, and he thinks of hallway light.</p><p>When his vision finally clears, Daniel is still talking, indistinct. </p><p>“It’s okay,” Daniel is saying, “it’ll happen next time. No worries”. His dark eyes are warm with affection. He is a large shape in the darkness, a black silhouette in the room’s post-dusk blue. </p><p>Walter turns his face away.</p><p>***</p><p>“Stay,” Daniel whispers into the back of Walter’s neck, voice blurry on the edge of sleep, and the terror that rises up in Walter is nothing less than absolute. He squeezes his eyes shut and feigns unconsciousness.</p><p>Daniel’s hand drapes itself across Walter’s ribcage, slides up his chest. Pressing.</p><p>Eventually, Daniel’s breathing lapses into breathy snores, and his grip relaxes. Walter stares at the ceiling for hours afterwards, utterly still.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Roche case drags on, interspersed with regular patrols. The boundaries dividing one evening from the next begin to blur; they all congeal together into one relentless, endless night.</p><p>Walter has not been sleeping well; Rorschach’s fighting has suffered for it. Twice in as many weeks, Nite Owl has needed to assist with easy assailants; several times, Rorschach has been clocked by clumsy blows and had to sit down with his face between his knees, head spinning.</p><p><em>(I hate you, </em>a woman is screaming in a too-small room, <em>you piece of shit, I hate you, I hate you!)</em></p><p>“That was a bad one,” Nite Owl says quietly from somewhere behind him. A large hand settles on Rorschach’s lower back, freezing him where he sits. “We should probably call it a night.”</p><p>“Shut up.” Rorschach spits. He senses Nite Owl’s wordless, tight-lipped anger; the warmth on his back withdraws. He feels very, very small.</p><p><em>I hate you</em>, he tries to think in Daniel’s direction, but it’s a lie. He’s not capable of it. The ire doesn’t come. So instead, he stays where he is, body hunched and head bowed, waiting for the shaking to pass.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>An indeterminate number of nights later, Rorschach draws his collar up against the spitting rain. It condenses on the lapels of the trench, on the tips of his shoes. Fog flows through the deserted streets.</p><p>This corner of Queens is a far cry from the neon haze of midtown or the jumbled tenements of Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Instead, it’s an abomination of architecture: a series of sprawling, too-wide streets filled with graffiti, torn-up mattresses and abandoned garbage; crooked railway tracks criss-crossing over multi-lane highways. Fifty feet from Rorschach’s back, trucks howl down the B.Q.E. </p><p>New York is scattered with gutted neighborhoods like these; bloated corpses of industries drowned in Manhattan’s wake. Within a decade, Rorschach estimates, they will be resurrected, reanimated in a grim parody of life by the grasping hands of corporate finance.</p><p>He walks. Another overpass blots out the dim, dead sky, and for a moment, he could be in any mid-sized city: Boston, Chicago, or a hundred other places besides; urban centers he has read about but never experienced firsthand. But when he turns to the west, Manhattan’s skyline flickers distantly in the grey humid haze, and he feels New York’s filthy noose tighten further around his neck.</p><p>Across the street is his destination. Cowering between a vacant lot and a junkyard is a no-name bar, dull blue light leaking from the flickering signs in its windows. Through careful research and several well-aimed threats, he has determined that this establishment is frequented by car thieves. </p><p>He cracks his knuckles, one fist pressed into the other, and approaches the peeling door.</p><p>***</p><p>As expected, the bar’s interior is just as roughshod as its outside: poorly lit and poorly cleaned, reeking of dust and outer-borough desperation. A decade’s worth of spilled beer sticks to the soles of his shoes.</p><p>A scattering of suspicious-looking men watch him from their gathering spot at the bartop; the dim blue light turns them bloodless as ghosts. Rorschach weighs his odds, decides to leave them where they are. Instead, he walks further into the building.</p><p>Rorschach has spent his nights in hovels like this: squalid watering holes, the settings for illicit back-room deals, other backwater places disgorged by the city after dark. One informant has escaped his interview with little more than bruises, several have been significantly more stubborn. He has used his own two hands to extract relevant information, as precise as any of Nite Owl’s gadgets. </p><p>These men deserve it; they all deserve worse. The ends justify the means.</p><p>Near the back of the bar is a scattering of mismatched tables, only one of which is in use. The sole occupant is a man with a half-full beer glass. He’s large, raw-boned, utterly generic; there are a thousand other men like him in the city’s underbelly. But he is wearing grease-stained mechanic coveralls from an auto body shop, and these make him relevant. </p><p>“Looking for a car.” Rorschach says. “Heard this was the place to inquire.”</p><p>“Fuck <em>off</em>,” the man says, blearily. He hunches low on the rickety stool, lays both forearms on the tabletop in a plain display of contempt. “Fucking masks.”</p><p>Rorschach strides closer, hands in his pockets. He can smell the alcohol wafting off of the man; can see the drunken, bloodshot whites of his eyes. It disgusts Rorschach on a moral level.</p><p>“Should have been more specific. Feeling picky. Looking for something gas-powered.” He takes another step closer; he is now face-to-face with the generic man, who is squirming like a cockroach under an impending boot. “Heard red’s a popular color these days.”</p><p>In the window, the neon sign flickers. The man’s eyes go saucer-wide—an implicit tell—and Rorschach has yet to meet a criminal capable of a convincing lie.</p><p>The car thief’s attempt at an uppercut is telegraphed, amateur flailing. Rorschach catches it, uses the angle to shove him to the ground. Rorschach is not a large man, but he is well-acquainted with the basic physics of leverage.</p><p>The criminal’s face presses against the floor, expedited by the sole of Rorschach’s shoe. The scattered crowd near the bartop looks over, then away. None of the other men makes any move to approach; Rorschach expects that this venue has seen more than its fair share of similar interrogations. </p><p>“Where’s Roche?”</p><p>It is just the two of them: Rorschach and this criminal. Something begins to hum in the distance, a failing circuit, an electrical storm.</p><p>“That had nothing to do with me, I—I wasn’t part of any of that.”</p><p>The criminal’s fear makes him stupid; he forgets both the facts of the case and the tenuousness of his positon. Rorschach reminds him of the latter by jerking his arm upwards, placing more weight on the criminal’s pronated shoulder. There is no reason for this man to know anything about Roche—no reason for him to recognize her name—unless he were involved. Even now, several weeks out from her disappearance, she has become hardly more than a blurb in the end pages of a newspaper. The city is trying to swallow her whole.</p><p>The criminal is still trying, poorly, to extricate himself. “It was just a guy! Just some big Coney Island guy: scruffy fucker, real ugly. Paid cash. Said he’d coming back when the ransom money came through—”</p><p>The bar tilts on its axis. The light is wrong.</p><p>(Rorschach thinks of a closet interior, a small child cowering inside. Knees scabbed over, grey with apartment dust, forgotten, forgotten forgotten—)</p><p>He sees the dollhouse.</p><p>A crack, a scream. The small bones of the man’s hand give way like winter branches. Rorschach watches, insensate, as the man writhes on the dim-lit bar floor; he slams the ball of his heel down on the criminal again <em>again again </em><em><b>again—</b></em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Before his tenure as Nite Owl—before aeronautics, before ornithology—Dan’s first fixation was folktales. He would check stacks of hardcovers out from his childhood library and devour them under the covers, way after his bedtime. He’d sneak dog-eared paperbacks into his suitcase before family vacations on the Cape, would flip through them in the firefly-dotted evenings, small hands turning page after page in the porchlit New England dusk.</p><p>Rereading them as an adult, they strike Dan as overly formulaic, but maybe knowing what’s supposed to happen is part of the appeal. The dragon that must be vanquished; the sword that must be claimed. The power inherent in a person’s name.</p><p>Another one of adulthood’s letdowns is that the real world isn’t so simple. Because Dan <em>knows</em> his partner’s name, and a million other things besides: the weight of his gloved hands and the arc of his neck and the shape of him by flickering streetlight. But there’s still something wrong. It feels a little like touching an ungrounded circuit, like missing a stair in the dark. It’s the terrible, nagging feeling that he’s not understanding something important. He just wants to know what to <em>do.</em></p><p>Dan catches himself thinking about it more often than he should, trying to puzzle out the final missing piece. He feels the weight of the observation on the tip of his tongue during joint patrols, senses the weight of it burning low in his chest as he rocks into his own hand, blurred and indistinct.</p><p>
  <em>Is it me?</em>
</p><p>Dan can still feel it now, tight in his throat. He shoves away the questions he can never ask, focuses instead on pulling off the condom without making a mess. He wipes one lube-covered hand across the sheets, because, at the moment, the state of his linens ranks pretty low on his list of priorities.</p><p>On the other side of the bed, Walter is already pulling his boxers back on. The glow of the outside streetlight catches the side of his face, throwing its planes into sharp relief.</p><p>“Was it okay?” Dan finally stammers out, but that’s only part of what he really needs to know. What he really wants to ask is <em>are you okay with this? </em>and, above all, the words that sink like a stone in his stomach, night after night, drowning him. <em>Are you okay?</em></p><p>But he knows he’ll never get an answer by asking directly, not one that means anything. So Dan shuts up and stares at Walter’s back instead, watching the muscles in Walter’s arms bunch and flex as he puts himself back together, one piece of clothing at a time.</p><p>“Yes.” Walter says —Rorschach now, mask rolled tightly back into place, impenetrable and expressionless. Neither the ink nor his voice reveal anything at all.</p><p>(Dan thinks of streetlights guttering, things skittering in the dark away from light’s probing fingers. Of dead stars in distant galaxies, sputtering out in the vacuum of space.)</p><p>Rorschach shifts, and the swath of streetlight slips off his jaw, forgotten.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The impact judders through Rorschach’s legs. He slams his heel into the prone criminal’s body over and over again. The man is now a fetal lump, breathing in wet-sounding gasps, globs of spit and mucus ooze from his face.</p><p>“<em>Grice”, </em>the man screams, a piercing, animal sound, “Grice, his name was <em><b>Grice!</b></em>” and the rest is drowned out by the sharp crackle of static roaring in Rorschach’s ears.</p><p>“Stop crying,” Rorschach says, and he hears it in distant duplicate, echoing and echoing—</p><p><em>(stop crying</em> <em>or I’ll really give you something to cry about)</em></p><p>—and then a closet door slams shut, is barricaded, and there’s nothing but apartment dust and the creak of floorboards in the overwhelming dark.</p><p>There is bile in Rorschach’s mouth. There is blood on his shoes.</p><p>He kicks and kicks and <em>kicks</em>, past the criminal’s threshold of consciousness, and for a terrible indefinite second, he is unsure if he even exists, cannot remember who he is: Rorschach, Walter, or something in between. He does not know his name. He cannot feel his limbs. </p><p>Tomorrow, he will read about the aftermath of this interrogation in the <em>Gazette, </em>will learn that this petty thief has incurred two severe fractures to his right orbital bone, significant and complex internal injuries. These physical consequences will seem just as unimportant then as they do now, neon lights casting jagged shadows across the filthy room. </p><p>Rorschach belts his foot to the wet ruin of the criminal’s face. Something cracks satisfyingly under his heel. The man’s limbs slump, limp, against the floorboards.</p><p>Rorschach leaves the street scum to gurgle. Now, he has a name.</p><p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Walter feels the rough pinpricks of the sequined dress first, pressing into the meat of his cheek. Blearily, eyes closed, he acknowledges his error. He has fallen asleep at work.</p><p>For a moment, he considers remaining where he is, eyes shut tight, face pressed to the warm wood of the table; by the time he sits up, he realizes staying asleep would have been preferable. His supervisor and floor manager are standing next to his workstation, peering down their noses. Their faces are pinched in disapproval. </p><p>With a dawning certainty, Walter realizes he is being fired.</p><p><em> Productivity concerns, </em> his supervisor is saying, <em> safety hazard</em>. The words come to Walter distorted, as if he were pinned behind glass.</p><p>Perhaps he is. Walter’s coworkers rubberneck from the sidelines, gossiping behind their hands. The setting of this discussion is plainly for show; this conversation could just as easily have been conducted in the factory break room or out on the bustling streets, where the only witnesses would be disinterested strangers. There would be no change in the end result.</p><p>But no, they are firing him in front of his coworkers. They are making him an example.</p><p>A prickling sweeps down his neck and back; the factory floor roils with the sound of machinery and the low, ominous babble of the gathered crowd. The lights are too bright and the room is too warm and there are too many eyes staring. </p><p>All he can hear is breathing.</p><p>***</p><p><em> Again, the bedroom. Again, the streetlamp, inescapable as any nightmare, again, again, again</em>.</p><p>***</p><p>Walter’s temples pound. For a moment, he’s unsure where he is: one of a long succession of decrepit apartments, or the dorms of Charlton, or cowering on the floorboards of his childhood home. He is reaching up to guard his face when the rusted shell of the factory comes rushing back to meet him.</p><p>***</p><p>
  <em> Large hands scrabble at Walter’s back. Daniel moans low in his chest, unabashed. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> (Daniel moans and the bedsprings creak and the shadows on the wall are something monstrous, inhuman, conjoined, and Walter has been here before) </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Walter knows he is most valuable to Daniel in this room, in this way. So he crushes his discomfort like a bug, buries it somewhere deep inside where it can no longer be felt. He makes himself small, smaller, until he is nothing, an unfeeling lump of meat and bone with no soul to animate it, as empty as any vacant building. </em>
</p><p><em> This way, when Daniel pulls Walter down to sit astride him, he can tolerate it. </em> <em> Because it is happening to someone else. </em></p><p>***</p><p>Walter blinks; the shift manager is still scratching a pen across a clipboard, his supervisor is still speaking. He says that Walter has been <em> disturbing the other employees</em>, he makes several inflammatory and untrue comments about Walter’s <em> personal hygiene</em>. </p><p>Walter’s employment is ended, effective immediately. He is asked if he needs someone <em> to assist him off the premises. </em> Clearly, they expect him to snap his leash and lash out, jaws frothing. </p><p>Their concerns are baseless, because Walter doesn’t make a scene. He doesn’t throw his half-finished garment to the floor; he doesn’t attempt to upend his section’s table, smashing the sewing machine into a twisted carcrash of metal on the factory floor. </p><p>Instead, Walter quietly leaves behind his workstation, a thimble and a handful of pins, the mangled, sequined corpse of the last dress he will ever sew. He walks past the line of gawking faces and steps out into the frigid November sunlight.</p><p>There are four crumpled dollars in his pockets, a handful of cans in his cabinet at home. He will make do for now; he will deal with his employment situation later. Once Roche is safely home.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>He boards the subway at Thirty-Fourth. </p><p>A faceless crowd boards-waits-exits in staggered waves: besuited bankers from financial institutions, shirts pressed and shoes immaculate, reeking of conceit; bleary-eyed construction workers holding cups of coffee; the occasional truant teenager. Walter watches all of them from the end of the car. </p><p>The train moans and whines, dipping aboveground and diving back below, every motion undercut by a low electrical hum. The sound has nothing to do with the subway. It’s the sharp crackle of systems breaking down.</p><p>***</p><p>Perhaps he sleeps. He doesn’t know.</p><p>The crowd begins to thin at Grand Street. It keeps thinning through Fort Hamilton Parkway and the numerical stations in the industrial wastelands of central Brooklyn. Passengers trickle out in groups, until even the vagrants are gone and only Walter remains in the empty car creaking down the coastline to its final station.</p><p><em> Last stop: Stillwell Avenue, Coney Island</em>, the loudspeaker drones. <em> Everybody off. </em></p><p>Then the dented orange doors open, and from horizon to sky, there is nothing but sea.</p><p>***</p><p>With no buildings to block it, the wind cuts like a knife. Were he in his uniform—high-collared, intimidating, a detective’s trench—he would be able to bear the cold. But he isn’t. Instead, Walter shivers in his civilian coat before he can stop himself. Its seams have been patched over and over until the original shape has been lost.</p><p>He turns his back to the endless expanse of water, looks away from the scrub grass sprouting low over rolling dunes. He walks, hunching into the gale, and descends into the warren of Coney Island.</p><p>***</p><p>Some sections of Coney Island’s streets sit lower than the sea surrounding them; water floods the blacktop with ankle-deep puddles. In both a metaphorical and literal sense, the neighborhood is an inescapable pit. Walter can’t muster the energy for pity.</p><p>The neighborhood knows exactly what it is. It’s the edge of a map, a final, liminal shore, a washed-out flatland made seasonally relevant by a cheap trick of geography. It’s a place for forgotten things. </p><p>In the winter, he soon realizes, foot traffic is nonexistent, even in the early afternoon. There are no Manhattan tourists to visit the boardwalk’s food stalls and carnival rides; their absence has sent the neighborhood’s workforce into a temporary hibernation. He stalks through the back streets in increasingly frantic loops, but it still takes him nearly an hour before he encounters anyone else. She’s so small, he almost misses her.</p><p>The woman is bent double with age; she sits on a bench near a bus stop sign nearly as folded over as her. A scarf is wound loosely around her ears and knotted under her chin; her hands shake with the cold.</p><p>“I’m looking for someone,” Walter says. “A man named Grice. He would be large, possibly ugly. Probably squatting on property that isn’t his.”</p><p>She stares at him with vacant, bovine eyes. She’s ancient, a relic, worse than useless. He tamps down his aggravation, grinds it under his heel, because there is a little girl somewhere in this brackish cesspool, waiting.</p><p>He asks about the car.</p><p>Distrust rolls off the woman in waves. She stands suddenly to leave; in his exhaustion, Walter very nearly lets her. But another gust of wind blows down the flooded street, scattering cigarette butts and the acrid stench of saltwater and Walter knows it is up to him and Daniel. No one else in the city cares: they are seven million bystanders, guilty by association. They are seven million bitten tongues, speaking nothing of any substance at all.</p><p>And perhaps, for the first time in his life, it benefits him to be Walter. Some expression must be showing on his face, something raw and broken-open, a physical manifestation of the urgency he feels pounding in his skull, because there is a lost child waiting for him, because–</p><p>Because the woman pauses, half-standing. In a momentary gesture, so subtle that a less-observant man would miss it, she raises her gnarled hand, shaking and spotted with age, and points towards a narrow street.</p><p>A bus arrives. She boards it, and is gone.</p><p>***</p><p>Walter is nearly asleep on his feet, but something still pulls him inexorably forward. The street makes a right hook on a dead end, past the warped wooden slats of a backyard fence, and when he finally rounds the corner, the dress shop looms above him.</p><p>It’s the dollhouse writ in life-sized scale, an abandoned standalone building grown warped and strange. The blackened windows stare out over the neighborhood, out over the water, forever, on and on; the open door gapes like a mouth and any number of things could be happening inside, hidden.</p><p>His memory glitches. His vision fills with static. He pictures a series of rooms, looped and intersecting; sees them from the vantage point of a child pursued–</p><p>
  <em> and his throat hurts from running, a man was there and walter came out and the man saw him and yelled and left and then his mother </em>
</p><p>
  <em> his mother—</em>
</p><p>
  <b> <em>get back here</em> </b>
</p><p>
  <em> and he’s running and running and he almost makes it but he’s too small to reach the apartment door handle, he’s little even for his age, everyone says that and she’s so big </em>
</p><p>
  <b> <em>get BACK here</em> </b>
</p><p>
  <em> and she’s screaming, still screaming, but he can’t even make the words out anymore because it’s just a terrible animal howl, he doesn’t know what’ll happen to him when she catches him, but five years later when he first reads the myth of the minotaur, sees an illustration of something stalking through a labyrinth, monstrous in the dark he will throw the book down on the library floor with sudden, wild terror, shaking shaking shaking—</em>
</p><p>
  <em> her hand closes around his upper arm </em>
</p><p>
  <b> <em>you ruined my life, you fucking ingrate, you ruined my goddamn life i wish i never had you i wish you were never born i’ll give you something to cry about</em> </b>
</p><p>
  <b>***</b>
</p><p>He runs. He runs and runs and doesn’t stop running until he’s back on the subway and it’s pulling out of the station and the rabbiting of his heart drowns out the scream of the gulls and the roar of the train, and then he hears nothing at all.</p><p>***</p><p>Time stops. Time starts again. Night falls.</p><p>Walter is standing on the Upper West Side. Walter is walking down the tunnel towards the Nest. Walter is standing next to the dormant Archimedes, one hand pressed flat against the freezing metal, and this is how he knows he is real.</p><p>He knows he should retrieve his uniform and go out for patrol. He recognizes he can go upstairs and wake Daniel. Both of these actions seem equally impossible. Because—</p><p>Because, as he’d fled from the dress shop in blind panic, a gust of wind had whipped at an ambiguous shape behind the fence. It had pulled the edge of a tarp up from its tenuous moorings and he’d seen a bright slice of metal, red as viscera. Red as blood.</p><p>The wave of adrenaline finally breaks. His body burns with exhaustion.</p><p>Walter shrugs off his threadbare coat, crumpling it into a rudimentary pillow. He places it on the hard metal of Daniel’s workbench and wraps his leaden arms around it. </p><p>He sleeps.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>It’s not like Dan really needs to buy groceries. The pantry and fridge are pretty well-stocked, and even though he’s kind of an eater, Dan knows he won’t be running low on anything anytime soon. He decides to go out anyway.</p><p>For the last couple weeks, the brownstone’s felt too large, uncannily empty, and if Dan’s honest with himself, his house really is too big for one person. When he bought it back in ‘62—choosing it for its size, quiet comfort, and proximity to the Museum of Natural History—he’d figured he’d grow into the space like an oversized piece of clothing. He’d figured, at the time, that he wouldn’t be living alone forever.</p><p>But now, ten-odd years later, he has three floors all to himself, and so what if the emptiness has suddenly become more apparent lately, for unspecified reasons? So what if he sometimes catches himself in his living room, imagining another person sharing the couch, warm and drowsy in the afternoon sunlight, just reading, just <em> being? </em> </p><p>He doesn’t want to think about it. So: groceries.</p><p>***</p><p>Even Manhattan wears its seasons on its sleeve. It’s the middle of November and the trees lining the avenue are bare echoes of themselves, wind whistling as it whips through their branches. The cold catches Dan completely unprepared. He’s still wearing his lightweight autumn coat; his heavy winter wear is still stored up in the attic, and he can’t believe how cold it is. Everything looked fine from the living room window.</p><p><em> Guess it depends on your frame of reference</em>, he thinks, gritting his teeth against the chill.</p><p>***</p><p>In the end, the supermarket doesn’t even keep Dan occupied for that long. It’s always a ghost town in the middle of the day and, before he knows it, he’s in and out and home.</p><p>He drops his grocery bags on the kitchen table, shakes his frozen hands until he can start to feel them again. The food gets slotted neatly into the cabinets, and he realizes he’s ended up with handfuls of items he already has: cereal, granola bars, cheap, preserved stuff in single-serve packages. Most of it’s stuff he doesn’t even eat.</p><p>The fridge hums.</p><p>In the living room, the answering machine’s new-message light has been blinking for two days straight; Dan hasn’t even looked at the machine for almost that long. He’s not avoiding it. Really. He doesn’t even need to listen to it again to know its contents, or to know that it’s from Laurie, because he already knows the message by heart.</p><p><em> Heard you were working on that kidnapping case. Just wanted to check in. Call me back when you can. </em> Pause. <em> Jon says hi.  </em></p><p>Click.</p><p>They’ve never really been close, nothing more than casual business acquaintances, but Laurie’s always been good at reading people. If he returns her call now, she’ll know something’s off. And it’s not like Dan’s not exactly the same as the last time they met—he’s happy, he <em> is—</em>but he’s. You know. Busy. New relationship growing pains.</p><p>Dan’s a planner, an engineer, a mechanical problem-solver. He can fix this too. He’ll call Laurie back, Dan tells himself. Really. Just not right now. </p><p>Even though he’s not really hungry, he chokes down a candy bar, tries not to gag at the overpowering taste of sugar. He tries not to think about the spare set of house keys in his pocket. He tries not to think about much of anything.</p><p>The basement door is ajar.</p><p>***</p><p>The Nest is almost exactly as Dan left it. Almost. </p><p>The neat stacks of paperwork are now spread in scattershot piles across Dan’s workbench, grouped in a way that Dan can’t make heads or tails of. Walter sits at the far end of the table, rifling through pages of incomprehensible notes.</p><p>Relief slams through Dan’s body. For a second, he’s floating.</p><p>“How long have you been down here?”</p><p>Walter doesn’t even look up. He grunts, half-shrugs, flips a scrap of paper over to stare at its backside, and even from the landing, Dan can see Walter’s hands are trembling very slightly—from exhaustion or too much caffeine, it’s hard to tell. The harsh industrial lighting only emphasizes the dark circles under his eyes.</p><p>As Dan gets closer, he can smell him, too: stale like mildew and old sweat, like old clothing that hasn’t been washed in days. It’s 3 PM on a Wednesday and although Dan doesn’t know what Walter does for a living, exactly, he knows Walter has some kind of day job.</p><p><em> Or, </em> Dan realizes with an uneasy jolt, <em> had. </em> Past tense<em>. </em></p><p>(The spare house key hidden in Dan’s pocket burns against his skin. <em> Move in with me</em>, he wants to ask, is <em> going </em> to ask. He’d imagined bringing it up under better circumstances.)</p><p>And Dan really is almost about to speak, but Walter beats him to it.</p><p>“I found the car. Was hidden under a tarp, out in the middle of nowhere. Possibly abandoned. Probably not.” He pulls a street map out of the mess on the table, gestures with a chewed-up pen at Brooklyn’s southern tip.</p><p>“The Chevrolet was the clue: car thief sold it to a man named Grice, almost certainly Roche’s kidnapper. There are a thousand arrows pointing directly to him. Couldn’t be any clearer, even with a neon sign.”</p><p>Walter grabs another sheet of paper and begins drawing a diagram, and, for a moment, this could be just any other bust. But his pen strokes are jittering and uncertain; he’s sharp, all angles, even more than usual. Between the lack of mask and unfamiliar civilian clothing—un-ironed slacks, a garish orange button-down that looks like it’s from the fifties—he’s almost unrecognizable. He doesn’t look like an unflappable detective. He looks like a person haunted by some private nightmare.</p><p>“Imagined I’d wait for backup. Odds are better with the both of us; simple math, two against one. Was able to stake out an entry point, but would be easier with the Archimedes. We could take him by surprise, descending on his hideout like a—”</p><p>“Can we talk about this?”</p><p>Walter’s monologue stops mid-sentence. He stares with his flat penny eyes. </p><p>Dan unfolds the idea for a minute, turns it over in his hands. The more he thinks about the case, the more obvious it seems: they’d never had any real leads, just a murdered man on an expired registration and some minor criminals with more self-preservation than sense. Just a whole mess of dead ends.</p><p>“It’s been over a month with no sign of her, and...we need to be realistic here. About what’s possible. There might not be anything left to rescue.”</p><p>Even Roche’s parents have given up. Dan heard through the grapevine that they held a funeral for Blaire: a small, symbolic gesture, small service, closed-casket and guestless, with no body to bury, mentioned in passing in the end pages of the <em> Gazette</em>. </p><p>It makes Dan’s chest hurt when he thinks about it—a child-sized coffin, buried the thin slice of dirt above the Manhattan bedrock, empty now, empty forever—and god knows he likes kids, cares about kids</p><p>(wants to raise a kid, eventually)</p><p>but at this point, it’s simple statistics. Probability. An increasingly decreasing percentage.</p><p>Dan slowly slides the obsolete diagram back across the table.</p><p>“I know it’s tough, but—”</p><p>“<em>Tough.” </em>Walter echoes, mouth a bloodless line. His hands tremor as they clench into fists.</p><p>“Must have been <em> tough. </em> For you to pull yourself away from your important schedule of sleeping and brunching. Was that <em> tough</em>, Daniel?”</p><p>“That’s not fair,” Dan blurts. It sounds like whining, even to his own ears, but it’s true. It’s <em> not </em> fair. He’s spent hours combing through databases on the basis of barely-there tips, spent weeks being the recipient of a million tiny jabs, and if he’s committed the cardinal sin of being human during a case, that’s hardly a crime.</p><p>Walter stands, kicking his chair backwards with a sudden violence, and he’s really trembling now.</p><p>“Is it <em> fair </em> to give up on her because she’s <em> inconvenient? </em> Not a picture-perfect milk carton portrait? Is that <em> fair?” </em></p><p>“That’s not what I’m <em> saying—” </em></p><p>“—that’s exactly what you’re saying—”</p><p>“—don’t put words in my <em> mouth—” </em></p><p>They’re both shouting now, voices echoing through the cavern of the Nest. Dan’s hands clench, white-knuckled, on the edge of the cluttered table, and why isn’t Walter <em> listening? </em></p><p>The spare key digs, knifelike, into the outside of Dan’s thigh. These are his daydreams going up in smoke: walking the streets of a new city with Walter at his side, kissing Rorschach on an empty New York rooftop on a moonless night. Waking up next to each other, body-to-body, and having someone there to reach out for in the dark. Having someone to grow old with.</p><p>There’s so much Dan wants, <em> has </em>wanted; none of it’s crazy or wild or shameful. Just someone to share a life with. Just someone who understands.</p><p>“No one cares; no one cared. You. Don’t. <b><em>Care—</em></b>”</p><p>Walter’s voice cracks on the last word; it breaks like a signal disrupted, echoing and echoing. It’s louder than Dan’s ever heard it, because Rorschach is a creature of silent intimidation and Walter is one of quiet, cutting precision. It rises until he’s screaming.</p><p>Something sears through Dan’s stomach, sharp and terrible. More out of reflex than anything else, he reaches for Walter’s shoulder.</p><p>
  <em> <strong>"Don't touch me!"</strong> </em>
</p><p>Walter covers his face, and out of everything happening, this is the worst. It’s the action of a terrified child, completely out of place on a grown man’s body; it makes Dan think of Jeffery Iddings and Blaire Roche and every single child victim the partnership has ever helped. A decade’s worth of Rorschach’s idiosyncrasies suddenly become horribly, crystally clear.</p><p>Dan watches uselessly as Walter stands there in his rumpled, reeking clothing, sobbing into his hands. The magnitude of Dan’s fuck-up overwhelms him completely. It takes a few minutes before he can even make himself speak, lightheaded with shame.</p><p>“I’m so sorry. God, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” </p><p>Walter makes a noncommittal noise. He wipes his nose on his shirtsleeve.</p><p>The only small comfort is that all of Walter’s manic energy seems to have bled out; he looks like he has no fight left. It takes very little prodding for Dan to lead him up the stairs, through the kitchen and up to the bedroom, Walter’s face a mask of weary resignation. He curls into himself on the bed, knees-to-chest, and falls asleep in seconds.</p><p>Dan lies down at Walter’s side, carefully keeping his distance. He tries to remember the city skyline, but all he can see is darkness.</p><p>***</p><p>When Dan finally jerks back to consciousness, it’s almost dusk. Sunlight slides down the wall, red-gold and ominous; it’s the last gasp of a dying day, and Dan can’t help but feel like he’s woken up into some kind of nightmare.</p><p>Dread he can’t explain creeps slowly up his spine. He rolls over, blindly reaching for the body next to him—he just needs a hand in his, just the sound of another person breathing—and then freezes, horrified, arm still extended into the silent bedroom air.</p><p>The bed next to him is empty. Walter is gone.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>The subway ride passes more quickly the second time. Walter stands, swaying with the rhythm of the train, his uniform in a paper bag beside him. No one acknowledges him at all. </p><p>Outside the subway windows, the sun is setting.</p><p>***</p><p>There is barking in the distance. He is not afraid. </p><p>***</p><p>He is not afraid. He is not afraid.  He is not afraid. </p><p>***</p><p>he is not afraid he is not afraid he is not afraid he is not afraid he is not afraid he is not afraid he is not afraid heisnotafraid<b> <em>heisnotafraid–</em> </b></p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>*</p><p>Kovacs dies alone and unacknowledged, crying out for his mother. You open your eyes for the first time.</p><p>***</p><p>The dress shop’s windows burst under the weight of the blaze, flames roaring out into the Brooklyn night. The walls catch and the roof catches and a dozen amorphous figures burn to blackened ash, and you finally understand—</p><p>You will never be afraid again.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The November wind howls at the doorstep, lashing at the windows. Inside, where everything is warm and motionless, the building holds its breath.</p><p>Dan drifts.</p><p>As long as he remains where he is, quiet and still, he doesn’t have to remember anything at all. He spends most of the day in bed, safe under thick blankets, floating in and out of sleep. Every time he wakes up, he gets a few quiet, blurry seconds, a short span of temporary unknowing. Then his memory comes crashing back, pulled to earth by gravity and the guilty weight of his conscience.</p><p>Hell with it, Dan decides: he’s going to do the right thing. The necessary thing, no matter how uncomfortable. </p><p>He repeats the thought to himself as he lays there, stock-still, not making any move to get up; the sun slinks lower and lower, bloated and red, until it passes behind the row of buildings to the west.</p><p>Something clatters one floor down.</p><p>Dan shoves the cocoon of blankets away, stumbles out of bed. Cold envelops him to the core.</p><p>***</p><p>A slice of late-day sunlight seeps through a gap in the kitchen curtains, bisecting the room in a searing line. The room is hushed, frozen and still. The brownstone holds its breath. </p><p>In the far corner, something shifts.</p><p>And Dan’s first impression is that the figure is some kind of sick trick. Its posture is off, stiff and robotic, like something trying and failing to pass as human. Dan’s had ten years to learn how Rorschach moves in the dark, and he knows: <em>this isn’t him</em>.</p><p>(<em>Ghost</em>, Dan’s brain suggests, wildly, dredging up long-dormant words from childhood books. <em>Shade. Dybbuk.</em>)</p><p>But that’s impossible. Because Dan would recognize that form anywhere: in the easy grace of New York by moonlight, silent after slowly removing his mask for the first time. Poorly lit by tenement fires and in howling snowstorms, outer borough alleyways. He knows that shape as well as he knows himself.</p><p>Rorschach stands by the closed basement door, as stock-still as any of the kitchen furniture. The line of window light falls just in front of his feet, leaving him lit only by its barest echoes. The mask shifts.</p><p>Out of kindness more than anything else—not fear, it’s not fear—Dan keeps his distance. He raises both his hands, palms out.</p><p>“I’ve been thinking,” Dan says, “you were right about Blaire. I’ll—give me ten minutes to get ready. We can go out and work the case together.”</p><p>They’ll do some recon, step out onto the streets dressed as better men, and the dull throb of unease that Dan feels will fade away to nothing. They’ll stride with purpose across the city’s rooftops, or fly above them in Archie’s dependable hold; Rorschach will trust Dan again, and everything, <em>everything</em> will be fine.</p><p>Rorschach doesn’t say anything at all.</p><p>Beneath everything, there’s the acrid smell of smoke and heavy weight of chemical fumes. It overwhelms the room until there's no space in the air for anything else. It seems oddly familiar, somehow. Like a name on the tip of the tongue. Dan doesn’t like it.</p><p>Something’s not adding up.</p><p>“Where’d you end up going last night? Home?”</p><p>“No.” Rorschach says, voice eerily flat. He steps into the line of light.</p><p>Sometimes, when Nite Owl fumbles a landing, boots connecting with a building at the rooftop's edge, his stomach drops to his toes, the distance between safety and danger just a little too close for comfort. Dan’s feeling the same lurching horror now, but it’s not the distant pavement that he’s afraid of.</p><p>Rorschach’s coat is soaked with blood, bright red and downright arterial. It arcs up his torso like a warning sign, like a distress beacon wailing from some distant shore.  </p><p>No one could bleed that much and stay standing; Dan's no doctor, but he's had more than his fair share of incidents at knife-point, and he knows: it’s a disabling amount. A fatal amount. The blood on Rorschach’s coat can’t be his.</p><p>(At the same time, a childhood memory finally snaps into place: piles of sticks and summer barbecues and the strike of a match above a pile of waiting tinder. Kerosene.<em>Fire.</em>)</p><p>Terror winds its fingers around Dan’s neck. This is it, the final, irrefutable truth, the reality that Dan has tried to avoid: nothing is right. Nothing will ever be right again.</p><p>“Walter,” he says, almost mindless with fear, “what did you <em><b>do?”</b></em></p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>Across the room, Daniel is panting, breathing wet and ragged in the encroaching dark. Your coat hangs heavy on you, clotted with gore. Ruined.</p><p>Insignificant. Unimportant. None of these vanities will ever matter again.</p><p>It only is the barest obligation that has brought you back to the brownstone, a vestigial sense of duty to a man you once believed respectable. Now, you recognize Daniel has always been like this, drowning beneath the tide of his own limitations, couched in the trappings of wealth.</p><p>He has only ever been a coward.</p><p>“We can fix this,” Daniel whispers. He cowers against the kitchen doorway, a large man made small by circumstance. “It doesn’t matter what happened. W-we’ll have you lay low for a couple of days. You can stay here—”</p><p>As if you have not already made your choice. It’s Kovacs that Daniel wants: Kovacs, writhing and weeping and wanting; Kovacs with his human needs. Not you at all. </p><p>Walter Kovacs is dead. The world is better for it.</p><p>“Grice murdered her. He dismembered her, cut her limb from limb. Fed her like scraps to his dogs." Your voice is steady; your hands do not shake. “Deserved what he got.”</p><p>There is canine brain matter spread across a derelict yard in Brooklyn; there is a story carved with a thousand cuts into a bloodstained butcher’s block. This is what Daniel does not understand, can never understand: this is all that New York is. It has only ever been a city of charnel houses, a limitless pack of buildings gaping with animal hunger. All too often, no one even finds the bones.</p><p>(You wish the world were like the dress shop, made of rotting wood and plaster. You would burn it all.)</p><p>Daniel forgets himself. He steps closer; his outstretched fingers brush your shoulder, the nape of your neck. His eyes are manic, hungry, and you see him as he really is: just another john, framed by incidental light.</p><p>“Walter,” he says again, pleading, and you are gripped with a wave of revulsion so complete it nearly brings you to your knees. How many children have been kidnapped, how many victims has this slavering city swallowed while Kovacs lost himself in fornication?</p><p>Because that’s not your name, not you, <em><b>not you—</b></em></p><p>***</p><p>Who are you, anymore?</p><p>***</p><p>Daniel’s nose fractures beneath your fist; the back of his head strikes the side of the door frame with a cataclysmic sound. Blood streams down his face, oozing through his cupped fingers, and for a span of seconds he is not fighting back, not <em>retaliating</em>, just staring helplessly at you with suddenly shining eyes.</p><p>It isn’t enough. It can never be enough. </p><p>Your hand closes around the first object it touches. A coffee-stained Guggenheim mug. A heavy weight against your palm. In the lowlight, you aim by sense more than eyesight: the improvised weapon held in your clenched fist, swung wide—</p><p>And then you are pitched to the floor, face slammed forcefully into the cold tile; the mug falls and shatters into a thousand shards, inches from your cheek. A knee presses into the base of your spine; your arms are pinned against the small of your back by a solid weight. Your former partner looms above you.</p><p>Daniel orders you to leave in Nite Owl’s voice. As if he occupies a higher moral strata than you, as if you cannot hear the reluctance beneath the blood bubbling over his mouth, dripping in slow increments onto your coat. As if you cannot feel him trembling. </p><p>You see no reason for argument.</p><p>When you extricate yourself from his grip, pulling yourself up into a standing position, he makes no move to restrain you further. His face catches the shifting shadows, making it impossible to read his expression. Unnecessary, now.</p><p>You plunge into the dim-lit basement, into the black maw of the access tunnel. Darkness swallows you whole.</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <strong> <em>Epilogue: 1977</em> </strong>
</p><p> </p><p>The streets churn with violence: jagged stripes of spray paint spread across building facades, a thousand scraps of paper whip through the dusky haze. Two thousand people scream from the streets, all the dust in the air tinging their faces an eerie red.</p><p>Nite Owl grits his teeth, inching Archie forward as slowly as possible into the worst of it. It feels like being digested.</p><p>At his left, the Comedian sprawls leisurely across the copilot seat. He’s a bad fit: too tall, too muscular, he’s a shape the space he occupies was never meant to hold. The white slice of scar tissue leers as he talks.</p><p>“Look at this. So much for all that ‘glorious progress’ shit. Feels more like sitting in a smoking crater.”</p><p>A projectile dings off one of Archie’s windows and bounces back into the churning crowd. The Comedian watches it arc back to earth, splaying out wider in the chair like it belongs to him. “Streets’re a mess. Might as well enjoy the ride.”</p><p>Nite Owl’s hands tighten on Archie’s yoke; across Seventh Avenue, a building bursts into a column of flame. The Comedian whoops, grinning, and pulls his new leather mask down low.</p><p>“Alright, Birdy,” he says, prying open the floor hatch. “Let’s crack some heads.”</p><p>***</p><p> </p><p>Seventh Avenue is unrecognizable.</p><p>Recently, in the coffee shops and subway stations and the city’s quiet streets, there have been whispers of nuclear war. Nite Owl thinks armageddon would look a lot like this: the blacktop burning, a red wind blowing through Midtown. </p><p>The rumors also show up in the papers sometimes—not in the main headlines or on the front page, necessarily, mostly just snippets in the middle of the <em>Gazette. </em>Or between sentences, all in subtext. But they’re there.</p><p>(Dan doesn’t read the papers as often as he used to. He doesn’t do much of anything in his kitchen anymore.)</p><p>The Comedian shouts something at the crowd, gun in hand. He’s lit from beneath by the glow of the burning city; it catches in the bright metal accents of his uniform, glints in oiled pools off the smooth leather of his mask. The light frames him as he lobs a tear gas grenade at the churning crowd below. </p><p>It leaves a ghostly afterimage, a snapshot frozen into the air long after the motion has ended. It'll haunt Dan for years</p><p>Nite Owl stands frozen on the ladder. He can’t seem to move, even as the people scatter, screaming, climbing over each other in a rush to get away. Beneath the goggles and cape and cowl, below the mask he’s hidden behind for over a decade, Dan realizes: this isn't what he wanted.</p><p>“Fucking crazies.” The Comedian gestures with the gun’s barrel at the fleeing mob, and even through the leather and respirator, Dan can hear him grin. “Speaking of lunatics: where’s your partner?”</p><p>Now there’s no one left standing on the streets but the two of them, nothing moving but the glow of the embers crackling through midtown; the thousand scraps of paper; the looming shell of the dying building, joists turning to cinders in the dark heart of the inferno.</p><p>The burning in Dan’s eyes has nothing to do with the smoke. There’s nothing he can do for New York now. </p><p>Maybe there never was.</p><p>“Oh, uh, ” Dan says, quietly, “he mostly works alone, these days.”</p><p> </p><hr/><p> </p><p>
  <em>And then there is this sound:</em>
</p><p>
  <em>a red noise of bones,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>a clashing of flesh,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>and yellow legs like merging spikes of grain.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I listen among the smack of kisses,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I listen, shaken between gasps and sobs.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>I am looking, hearing,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>with half my soul upon the sea and half my soul upon the land,</em>
</p><p>
  <em>and with the two halves of my soul I look at the world [...]</em>
</p><p>
  <a href="https://fandom-poetry.dreamwidth.org/4369.html#cutid1"> <span class="u">Pablo Neruda,</span> <span class="u"> “</span> <em> <span class="u">Agua Sexual”</span> </em> </a>
</p><p>
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  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>This was a very difficult piece to write. Thank you all for reading.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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